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Monday, July 23, 2012

Dana Milbank Hurls McCarthyism to Shield Obama from Criticism

Even though -- according to a number independent fact-checkers -- Obama has been running around for the past month using $100 million in ads to hit Mitt Romney with lies; even
though Obama's top surrogates have been using the word "felon" to describe Romney -- The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is now demanding that Romney shut up.

We saw this in 2008, when the desperate and desperately corrupt media attempted to silence legitimate criticism of Obama by equating and tying that criticism to racism, crazies, and extremists. And what this is is nothing more than a form of New McCarthyism, by means of which you smear, terrorize, and marginalize those you disagree with by drawing a very long and dark line from what they've said or what they believe in to portray them as scary, freaky, wacko lunatics who might be dangerous.

Here's Milbank at work. Tell me this isn't a bald-faced act of McCarthyism against Mitt Romney:

On an official Mitt Romney campaign conference call this week, former New Hampshire governor John Sununu tested the latest effort to paint the commander in chief as disloyal to his country.

“I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” the Romney surrogate said.

Sununu, challenged, later apologized for the words — but not the sentiment. And that’s not good enough.

It’s not good enough because Sununu, like other prominent Republicans, is winking at those conservatives who continue to make the claim, often race-based, that President Obama is something un-American, something “other” than the rest of us. On Thursday, two days after Sununu’s attack, Romney himself said that Obama lacks “an understanding of what it is that makes America such a unique nation.”

Sununu and Romney are legitimizing people such as Cliff Kincaid. Also on Thursday, Kincaid convened his annual conference at the National Press Club for conspiracy-minded conservatives, this one about Obama and “Radical Islam.”